What Social Media Networks are SMBs Linking to on their Websites?

Here at Brandify, we often come across wildly different perceptions of what small business owners say they are doing to improve their online brand versus what they are actually doing.

In our most recent study, rather than relying on polling or written responses, we culled anonymous data directly from our database of over 20,000 SMB websites in order to cut through the muddle of opinion. The result is the most accurate assessment we could find of which social media networks SMBs from all over the US find important enough to link to on their websites.

We arranged the results in the most effective way possible: an Infographic! Please feel free to look through the results yourself and read below for additional commentary.

Facebook and Twitter remain the most popular social networks among SMB’s for promoting their online brands. Facebook, however, was the only category in which local businesses had reached the same adoption as national brands.

After Twitter, the most popular embedded link on SMB’s websites is YouTube. In fact, YouTube’s penetration among SMB’s exceeds it’s sister service Google+ by a significant margin among both local businesses and national brands.

Google+ Business was launched in November 2011, making it a relatively new portal, and is now linked to more often on the websites of both national and local businesses than LinkedIn.

And while LinkedIn may be a juggernaut in the professional networking space, small businesses prefer to link to the other social networks on their websites as channels to promote their online brand.

Finally, while Pinterest may be the newest channel for businesses to interact with their customers on a social level, it has already reached nearly half of powerhouse Google+’s adoption and represents the fastest-growing social network adopted by both national and local businesses.

Of course, a link to a social media page from a business website is not the whole picture. In our next analysis we’ll look at 12 month engagement across the different social media sites, where SMB’s are active and engaged with their audience versus just ticking the social media box.